


Wedding Invitations and Blind Dates

by lady_ragnell



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-27
Updated: 2011-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-28 06:45:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/304907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Arthur is not a cliche, everyone has comfy couches, Uther is omnipotent, and Merlin has magic pockets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wedding Invitations and Blind Dates

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://kinkme-merlin.livejournal.com/13287.html?thread=11356391#t11356391) on kinkme_merlin.

Arthur believes in true love.

Not in soul mates, or in love at first sight (he clings to being non-cliche fiercely, though he suspects it’s a failing battle), but certainly in true love. It’s hard not to when the evidence is everywhere. He was brought up hearing hushed stories about his parents and their devotion to each other, and the mention of Ygraine’s name is still one of the few things that makes Uther’s face go soft. Her absence was everywhere in his childhood, from visits to her grave on holidays and birthdays to the fact that Arthur had two pediatricians (he was ten before he realized that not every kid in his class got a second opinion every time they were diagnosed with a sniffle, and twelve before he dared ask his father why and was informed by a well-meaning aunt that “dear Uther doesn’t trust doctors, not after what happened with Ygraine”).

And it’s not just the ghost of his parents’ painfully happy marriage that makes Arthur believe in love. Now that he’s in his late twenties, his friends seem to be dropping like flies to marriage, and he would be upset if they weren’t all so perfect for each other. Gwen and Lance had been first, falling for each other the summer after college, and six years later they are still cooing at each other and saying “I missed you” if they’d been apart for half an hour and talking about fertility clinics.

(Arthur sometimes questions the health of a relationship that sickeningly sweet, but it seems to work for them, so he keeps his nose out of it.)

After them, it had been a rash of footie mates and university friends and work acquaintances and what seemed like a thousand pretty ivory envelopes with his name scripted in careful calligraphy on the front waiting in his mailbox whenever he checked it (he suspects that several top calligraphers in the city probably know his address by heart, and have since he was twenty-five. It’s not a heartening suspicion).

Morgana, through it all, had kept him from going insane, mostly because she was single as well. She was a distant cousin of some sort, and they’d been brought up together (well, brought each other up, more like) because her parents liked to jet off to exotic locales and left her with Uther, who could support another child without blinking an eye. But then, when they were twenty-seven and the wedding fever was dying down at least a bit, Arthur had introduced her to one of his still-single footie mates, Leon, and the next thing he knew, they’d eloped to Spain.

Since then, everything had been ... different. He couldn’t say he resented any of them, exactly, because all of them are so damn happy that it feels cruel to wish they hadn’t fallen in love. But Arthur, for no reason he can discern, is still going on blind dates set up by his well-meaning friends (mostly Gwen, who works in an office with an inexplicably large amount of gay men) or showing up to dinner parties alone, and while most times he doesn’t mind, more and more often he’s ... lonely.

He doesn’t know what to do about it, either. His friends don’t mind that he’s single, Lance calling him the “token bachelor” and Morgana informing him that she’s living vicariously from him now that she is old and settled, but when they start talking over dinner about their weddings or their plans for the future, Arthur excuses himself early or has an extra glass of wine, ignoring Gwen’s obvious concern, and tries to ignore the ache in his chest. Mostly, it doesn’t work.

So maybe Arthur does believe in soul mates. He’s just starting to believe that he doesn’t have one.  
*  
“Lance says the new bloke at his office is perfect for you,” says Gwen one night on the phone, sounding more worried than chirpy.

Arthur is in for the evening, drinking cheap beer and watching action movies and resisting the urge to see if there’s ice cream in his fridge, because he is not a cliche, damn it. “You all think that any gay man in the city is perfect for me. This will be number ten this year. And it’s April.”

Gwen pauses before forging on. “Mordred is lovely, I promise. And yes, he’s a bit young ...”

Arthur sighs. “How young, Gwen?”

“Well ...” He doesn’t want to hear the answer, because he suspects the number will be far too low for him not to feel like a creep, and he doesn’t want to know if that would stop him or not. “He’s just interning there, so he’s only twenty, but really, he seems quite nice, if a bit quiet. Morgana met him, and she likes him.”

“Gwen, I am hanging up now. Call me when you’ve had your head checked.” Arthur hangs up and goes back to his explosions with less enthusiasm than before.

Later, in bed, he gives up on trying to read himself to sleep, because even business documents aren’t doing the job, and fights back irrational tears because he is still not a fucking cliche. His friends are banding together to set him up with children while they cuddle on their lumpy couches (he doesn’t know what it is--Gwen has always seemed like an overstuffed sofa sort of person, so he wasn’t surprised to walk into the flat she shares with Lance and find one when they moved in together, but Leon and Morgana both had perfectly serviceable and sleek furniture before the wedding, so he was a bit horrified to walk into their flat and find a big comfortable couch in the living room. With floral upholstery, no less).

He gets a text message from Morgana just before he falls asleep. _Gwen says you won’t give Mordred a chance. Come on, Arthur, he’s nice, I promise. We just want to see you happy_. He doesn’t answer.

After that, he can’t stop seeing it. A few years ago, when he let his friends fix him up, the men were his age, attractive, successful, charming ... he’s still friends with some of them, even, and there was never anything wrong with them, but there was never the spark he’s looking for, the one that Gwen and Lance have always had, the one he recognized a mile away when Morgana spent a night at the pub ordering Leon around. Now, though, their attempts seem a little more desperate: Mordred, who’s practically a child. Morgana’s co-worker Edwin, whose looks don’t matter quite as much as his oily manner. Leon’s cousin Owain, who Arthur suspects isn’t even certain he’s gay.

“You’ve just got to give them a chance,” Morgana says over lunch one day.

Arthur is treating her to her favorite heinously expensive restaurant and had vain hopes that gratitude would prevent an ambush of this sort. “Don’t trust me to find someone on my own?”

“I might if I thought you were trying. When’s the last time you went out to a club, or even to the pub without us?”

“It’s lonely doing it on my own, and you know it. I know that your newlywed zeal convinces you that I’m in dire need of a mate, Morgana, but perhaps you could leave it for now? I need a break.” He pauses. “I’ve half-convinced myself there’s no one for me at this point.”

He’s miscalculated. If he were talking to Gwen, she would have taken it as a joke, and clucked and tutted and then changed the subject. Morgana knows him better than anyone, so she reaches across the table and grasps his wrist. “Oh, Arthur. There’s someone. You’ve just got to keep looking.”

Fuck dignity and not being cliche, Arthur decides that night when Lance texts and says he suspects his doorman is gay and maybe Arthur should come visit them more often, and lets himself cry.

And then the next day he tells Gwen to set him up on the damn date with Mordred just so they’ll leave him alone. He isn’t surprised when Mordred just stares at him wide-eyed all through dinner and flees afterwards like he’s afraid Arthur is out for his virtue. Arthur feels old.  
*  
He gets sick, of course, after flu season should be completely over, and stomps around his office sniffling and sneezing and terrifying his secretary and snapping at Lance when he dares mention the doorman again. Three hours into work on the second day of his illness, he is summoned to Uther’s office on the top floor.

(Of course Uther knows that Arthur is at less than his best. He either has the best spy network in the corporate world or Arthur’s office is bugged. Or possibly both.)

Arthur wheezes his way up the stairs, because maybe that will help him work his aggression out. “I’m told you’re ill, Arthur,” Uther says, as if he’s proclaiming it to a kingdom. “You’ve been working hard lately. Perhaps you ought to take the week off.”

“Perhaps” means it’s an order. Arthur glumly faces the prospect of not even having work to distract him from the misery that is his life. “Yes, father. I’ll let you know if I can’t make dinner on Thursday.”

“Please do.” Arthur does not stomp his way down the stairs. He simply walks a little more firmly than he is wont to do, and he grabs his coat from his office, informs his secretary that he will be out and she can tell everyone so, and goes to the store for tinned chicken soup and tissues, because he can’t stand the thought of Gwen fussing over him.

Because he is gearing up for the worst day in history, Arthur has a coughing fit in the middle of the canned goods aisle. Someone hisses sympathy from nearby, and then there’s a hand on his arm. “Ooh, mate, that doesn’t sound too good.”

Arthur wipes his eyes, which are watering, and shakes the hand off. “I am not your mate.”

“I’ve got some lozenges in my pocket.” The hand is now fluttering about next to his arm, and Arthur turns to tell the stranger to get his nose out of Arthur’s business and looks right into the bluest pair of eyes he’s seen in a while. The eyes belong to a man with messy dark hair and an odd, not-quite-handsome face that seems to be mostly taken up by cheekbones and a sympathetic grin. “I got sick a few weeks back, and it’s lucky I never clear my jacket pockets out.”

Arthur wants to ask who the hell the man thinks he is and why Arthur would want anything out of his filthy jacket pockets, but he is interrupted by a sneeze that has him scrambling for a tissue. An instant later, there’s a handkerchief in front of his nose. “You can’t be serious,” Arthur says, still patting his pocket with one hand.

“Oh, but I am. Blow.”

Somehow, instead of asking the nutter next to him if he thinks Arthur is six, Arthur finds himself taking the handkerchief and sneezing into it a few more times before apologizing and stowing it in his pocket. A second later, the stranger has produced a little bottle of hand sanitizer and a properly-sealed bag of cough lozenges, and he proffers both to Arthur. “Jesus, you’re like a walking pharmacy.”

“I always seem to have something useful in my pockets. My uncle Gaius says it’s a gift. Will says it’s bloody annoying. It seems to be helping you, though.”

Arthur wants to be grumpy and tell the stranger to leave him the hell alone, but the man is strangely disarming. “Fair enough.” He sanitizes his hands and gets a lozenge out of the bag before unwrapping it and popping it in his mouth, almost choking on the strong taste of menthol.

The stranger refills his pockets and sticks a hand out, still grinning. “I’m Merlin, by the way.”

“Arthur. I’m Arthur.”  
*  
It seems like he can’t go anywhere without running into Merlin, and he’s nearly certain that neither of them is doing it on purpose. “Still sick?” Merlin asks at the Chinese takeaway, and when they leave and Arthur discovers that he wasn’t given chopsticks, Merlin pulls a disposable set out of his pocket before waving and heading off in the opposite direction.

“You’re stalking me, aren’t you,” Arthur says at the bank two days later, and Merlin grins and hands him another cough lozenge because his voice sounds terrible.

“Of course, it all makes sense,” Merlin announces from behind him when he finds Arthur ineffectively trying to put up a flier for Gwen and Lance, who have lost their cat. The tape isn’t sticking. “You would be the reason I found a tack in my pocket just now.”

“Something’s different,” declares Morgana when she calls him the next week, and won’t let him pass it off as feeling almost completely recovered from his cold. “No matter. I’ve met the perfect man for you, and I mean it this time.”

Drake turns out to be good-looking, but insane, as he informs Arthur within the first ten minutes that their paths do not lie together, and he must find the other side of his coin elsewhere. And then proceeds to point behind him to Merlin, who seems to be getting takeout and blushes when Arthur turns and then waves. When Arthur turns back to ask Drake how he knows Merlin, his date is already putting a few bills on the table and smiling enigmatically. Merlin comes and sits down and smiles, unsure. “Did I just interrupt a date?”

“He interrupted the date, and I’m glad. Pull up a chair, I’ve got nowhere to be tonight.”

He and Merlin talk for hours, about everything and nothing, and Arthur finds himself inviting Merlin to his weekly dinner with his friends. “You can call me for directions. I’ll give you my number,” he says, and hopes he manages to pass it off as normal.

Merlin blinks apologetically (and how the hell is it, Arthur wonders, that he can tell what Merlin’s thinking just by seeing him blink?). “Forgot my phone at home, actually, but if you write it down for me I’ll definitely call you.”

“Don’t have a pen,” says Arthur, and curses himself.

Merlin grins, and rummages around in his jacket pocket for a second. “But I do.”

And Arthur bursts out laughing, and wonders if Drake isn’t the only crazy one around, because Arthur can already see how dinner will go, how Gwen will take to Merlin instantly and Morgana will size him up before giving in to his stupid grins, and he can see (and he knows it’s way too soon, but he sees it anyway and from the idiot smile on Merlin’s face while Arthur writes down his number, he isn’t the only one seeing it) the invitations going out and one very surprised calligrapher finally putting Arthur’s address in the return spot, and an overstuffed couch sitting in the middle of his living room.

 _Fuck being cliche,_ Arthur thinks, giddy, _maybe I’ve got a soul mate after all._


End file.
